Matthew is engaged in the procurement of a company that is specialized in making water meter instruments. Their parent company is a listed company in the United States. Before, he came to us with RFQ, their water meter parts were made by metal die-casting like most water meter parts in the market, metal parts have high strength but they are also with high cost and high defective rate.
Matthew came to us in 2011 and hoped to use PPS with glass fiber additive instead of metal. PPS is an expensive engineering material, which has the advantages of high strength similar to metal, but it is difficult to produce because the temperature of the mold and machine needed by PPS molding is very high, it is easy to damage the machine and burn the mold if without proper machine and suitable mould construction, the PPS material’s flowability is also poor, and most of their company’s products are high-precision gear parts, this demands very high requirements on the structure and accuracy of the mold. And also, because the wall thickness of the parts are big and the PPS flowability is poor, during plastic injection molding process, it’s easy to cause air bubbles inside the product, this would requires machines with good performance as well as very experienced machine operators, and the PPS material specified by the customer is imported from Japan whose price is very high. If the quality and defective rate cannot be controlled, it is easy to make the order loss, this is a great challenge to our company.
Our engineers made a detailed product evaluation and mold evaluation when starting the project, because a good start is half the success. As the mold temperature required during production is very high, the design of the cooling system in the mould is a key point. Our engineers made a detailed DFM report and mold flow analysis to ensure the optimization of mold structure, Finally, we completed the challenge excellently and produced qualified samples at the first mold trial. The customer was very satisfied, because it also meant that it would save their company a lot of costs by replacing metal parts with plastic PPS parts. His company then asked us to make moulds for most of their metal gears and parts and order PPS parts from our company. Later, we tried to produce the gears with another more expensive plastic PEEK based on the customer’s requirement, and it was also successful.
In the past 12 years, the customer has always been very satisfied with the price, quality and service of our company. They also trust us very much and have become one of our loyal customers.
